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iOS 8 wasn't the smoothest operating system rollout in Apple's history.

It's true, any other ecosystem would kill for Apple's OS adoption figures—as of this writing, 87 percent of the userbase is running some version of iOS 8. But it had a slower start than past versions of iOS, it required a ton of free space to install, and it had a few unfortunate bugs early in its life cycle that gave it a bad reputation. Like iOS 7 this was a big release, and with any big change comes the potential for big bugs.

Viewed from that lens, iOS 9 feels kind of like iOS 6 did. This is a necessary spit-and-polish release that followed two bigger, transformative releases. There's some good stuff here, but nothing that's quite as all-encompassing as iOS 7's complete redesign or iOS 8's introduction for Handoff and Continuity and Extensions.

At least, that's broadly true for iPhones, iPods, and older iPads—the majority of the userbase. If you've got a newer iPad, however, Apple is making some long-overdue changes that make the tablet much more capable.

In this review, we'll be focusing on iOS 9 features that are available to current devices. There will doubtless be a few software features unique to the new iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, and iPad Pro, but we'll cover those in our reviews of those devices. Let's get started.

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Andrew Cunningham
Andrew wrote and edited tech news and reviews at Ars Technica from 2012 to 2017, where he still occasionally freelances; he is currently a lead editor at Wirecutter. He also records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites